Subdomains maintained by The Daily Telegraph website were defaced by a group of angry Romanian hackers on Thursday.
The two subdomains - shortbreaks.telegraph.co.uk and wine-and-dine.telegraph.co.uk/site/index.php - were sprayed with identical digital graffiti by the hackers from the previously unknown RNS – Romanian National …

Hoo hoo hoo

Pretty harsh stuff

"Know that we will not stop here"

What could possibly be more shocking than defacing a seldom-visited sub-page of a moderately popular website? Defacing the Homes & Gardens page? Or just step it up to all out warfare? I will assume that these Romanians aren't speaking for their countrymen with any kind of official status.

Gypsies aren't Romanians?

Ignorant Romanian Hackers.

I'm with Mickey, how do you know those weren't Romanian Gypsies? Besides, the very core definition of a Gypsy goes beyond borders--they're nomads!

If this is the episode where they're driving through Romania to get to the twisty highway up north, then the hackers are even dumber. The whole episode was in honor of the best driving highway on the planet and was PROMOTING the country not defiling it.

Why is it offensive?

I don't get it. What' wrong with being a gypsy? In actual fact, Romania has a vast population of them. I don't see why it's offensive. Speaking from experience and what i've seen from the vast immigration of romanians near my area (which i'm gonna have to move soon) there is a healthy amount of gypsy romanians. My personal opinion and not of that of theregister.co.uk.

maybe not the brightest hackers then

Murdoch = loo-paper

Petrea wrote: "One small problem with this brilliant hacktivistic revenge is that it was Jeremy Clarkson who made those comments-- and he writes for the Times."

Ah, so the great ocker paywall that Murdoch put up on Sun/Times (I'm sure I've seen a Clarkson rant list in the former too) wasn't strictly to make world+wife pay up for his (Rupe's) opinionated drivel, but to keep one of his star journo's safe from the threat of roving Romanian retribution.

RE: Wrong newspaper

Romanians and Romanian Gypsies

In Romania, the gypsies are seen as a separate nation of people (they even have their own kings and emperors, and their own set of laws, unrecognised by the state, of course), even if they have Romanian citizenship and ID cards. Romanians hate the Romanian Gypsies because wherever they go they screw things up and then they are labeled by their citizenship in the press. The Romanian people then are feared as a whole, even though, statistically speaking, the good/bad people ratio isn't that much different from any other European country (the UK included).

To make matters worse, the Gypsy ethnic group is called "Roma" and "Romani", which collides with "Romanian", even though the terms are similar only by coincidence, not by relation. The Government itself is taking steps, when it can, to dissociate the terms. The ID cards and passports now use the country identification "ROU" (from French "Roumain", "Roumanie"), replacing the age old "ROM" moniker, because "rom" in Romanian means means "gypsy", "member of the Romani people", and foreigners saw "ROM" as meaning "gypsy" as well.

Because the deeds done by these people reach the headlines so fast, the Romanian people are furious. Hacking attempts are just one way of expressing this, and just happen to be a high profile one. I don't condone hacking, mainly because it just adds petrol to the fire, but other means of making it clear that not all Romanians are bad seem to be inadequate in the face of tabloid-like articles.

I've worked on a few European programmes on "gypsy integration", in Romania, and I can tell that it's an excruciating job trying any kind of integration for these people. They'll happily participate in your integration programmes, giving you the impression that they're co-operating and your programme is successful, yet as soon as you're gone, they're back at their antics, making fun of you, behind your back, of how naive you are investing so much money in "educating" them. The only ones profiting from this are the gypsies themselves, yet it has to be tried, hoping that one day a tipping point will be reached.

The Romanians are pissed because they're put in the same pot as the gypsies, and they find this to be very unfair. If you read the papers across Europe, you'll always find mixed articles: one day a Romanian rapes the a woman and/or kills her, the next day a Romanian is killed while protecting somebody from a native. The Romanians are pissed also because the first kind of article reaches first page on the likes of Daily Mail, while the second kind is buried deep on page 66 or something, in small print, on a side column. But then again, that's also true about English, French, American, etc. paedophiles that come to Romania for sex with under-age children, or to adopt children for their internal organs, or they fatally hit a person with their car and they flee to their home country under diplomatic immunity, and so on.

We all have weeds, and the Romanians just happen to show up more often than not.

While writing this, I remembered a film called "Gadjo Dilo". If you can get your hands on it, please watch it. There's one scene in there which shows quite well both the "native" Romanian temper and the Romanian gypsy temper, where a Romanian guy attempts a verbal bad joke about a gypsy - both of them in the same bar, drinking -, in good old Romanian tradition, and the gypsy, showing that he can take a joke, attempts a practical joke of his own: in anger, he throws a glass into the Romanian's face, killing him, in good old gypsy tradition (which typically involves ninja swords, but anything will do if you don't have one around).

People angry at Clarkson

Have they ever watched Top Gear?

Name one country which hasn't been poked fun at by the Top Gear Team, Just goes to show you Romanians have zero sense of humour.

PS - To the Romanians : If you were watching a repeat of the show on "Dave" you probably would find they have cut the interesting local scenic shots which the BBC tend to show. So its all Daves fault :-)

Yes, we have watched Top Gear

And a lot of us understood it was just Clarkson's style. We are really happy/grateful they came in our country.

But some of us did not and these hackers just reacted to what was a last straw in the "Picture Romania as Europe's reservoir of gypsies and criminals" campaign Western Europe and especially Britain is running.

I do not blame them for what they did. They bring attention to an importand issue. I am sorry they were unable to hit the main website.